Benno Senoner wrote:> Lee Revell wrote:> >> On Mon, 2004-07-12 at 19:31, Andrew Morton wrote:>> >>>>>>>> OK, thanks. The problem areas there are the timer-based route cache>>> flushing and reiserfs.>>>>>> We can probably fix the route caceh thing by rescheduling the timer >>> after>>> having handled 1000 routes or whatever, although I do wonder if this >>> is a>>> thing we really need to bother about - what else was that machine up to?>>>>>> >>>>>> Gnutella client. Forgot about that. I agree, it is not reasonable to>> expect low latency with this kind of network traffic happening. I am>> impressed it worked as well as it did.>> >>> > Why not reasonable ? It is very important that networking and HD I/O > both don't interfere with low latency audio.> Think about large audio setups where you use PC hardware to act as > dedicated samplers, software synthesizers etc.> Such clusters might be diskless and communicate with a GBit ethernet > with a high performance file server and> in some cases lots of network I/O might occur during audio playback. So > having latency spikes during network I/O> would be a big showstopper for many apps in certain setups.> Even ardour if run on a diskless client would need low latency while > doing network I/O because it does lots of disk I/O> which on the diskless client translate to lots of network I/O.> Typical use could be educational or research institutions where diskless > clients drastically lower the cost of managing large number> of boxes and allow sharing of resources. See the LTSP project.

Having used "diskless" systems off and on for almost two decades, I highly suggest that you are better off with a disk in the node, and use that for swap and temp. If you place any value on the time of people, this will eliminate a lot of performance (time and bandwidth) issues, and usually save on the cost of managing, since you have nothing to manage on the node and a lot less network traffic to handle.

I've done it with SunOS, Solaris and Linux.

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